Song, by Toad

This is just a brilliant, brilliant album. I don’t know what it is about the Meursault sound that I love so much, but there’s something in the combination of scratchy, back-of-the-cupboard-in-the-next-room electronica and the reckless chimes of the banjo and ukulele that just makes me crazy. Then there’s the pace; the music may be open to accusations of miserablism but it’s not morose, and that rhythm just drives it on through everything as if even in heartbreak it had somewhere very urgent to go.

And then there’s also the voice. I’ve described Neil Pennycook’s superb vocals as a plaintive howl in a live setting, but recorded he’s a bit less dominant. They’ve faded his voice out slightly, and put it in the back of the same cupboard as the electronics. It’s so deliberately crackly and just slightly distant that there’s a kind of mysterious quality to this album, almost like an old photograph that’s blurred just enough that you can’t quite be sure of the faces you’re looking at, but you think they look just enough like you that you might be related: disquieting slightly, and yet familar and intimate.

Neil said that they recorded their first EP with the help of a label, but that the label didn’t really bring much to the equation that he felt he couldn’t do better himself, so they released this album without a label. Go to their MySpace and order a copy – you’ll have to contact them as the only ‘Buy It’ link appears to still be for their old EP, although hopefully they’ll get that sorted soon enough – and I can promise you you won’t regret it. The whole record has perfect shape, a gently arcing emotional direction, and a gorgeous sense of completeness, the likes of which I haven’t heard in a ‘proper’ album for a while.

If last year was the year of the small label on Song, by Toad, then this year is shaping up to be the year of the self-release.

Meursault – The Dirt & the Roots
Meursault – The Furnace (Album Version)